‘James Joyce’ rants on kuro5hin.org:
“You are all pretentious twats, every last one of you. You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky. Most of you think that you’re writing original content and that you’re making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons ‘Some Rights Reserved’ licences, just because it’s the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.”
For the record, I don’t use Movable Type, nor an iMac (I’m surprised he singles it out and that anything other than Linux passes muster!). I think lattes have become effete but, when I do drink one (never never at Starbucks) I avoid sipping it. I am not a WASP and do not live in the suburbs. I am not even clear about what a tertiary industry is. Some of my readers feel that I distinguish myself when I write about my one specialist field. I challenge myself to write original content every once in awhile but suspect I am not that good at it. Yes, I plead guilty to carrying the little Creative Commons logo here because I thought the concept was hip. Nope, I created my own layout, I know at least enough HTML and CSS to be proud of that, but more proud of the assistance I received from other generous members of the weblogging community in my efforts. However, alas, no javascript, which would have been really hip, as you put it. Can’t recall the last mythological allusion I made and no pictures of myself, pensive or otherwise. I guess my weblog (I would go further than you do; “blog” is not even barely acceptable, and I apologize for any instances of using the word that have slipped through) might squeak by?
‘Joyce’ ‘s concerns about the rhetorical faux pas‘s and the sheeplike manner in which a single opinion echoes through the weblog universe (yes, I will never use the term ‘blogosphere’ either, although ‘blogroll’ isn’t galling to me at all), on the other hand, make more sense to me, and I do wonder about the impact weblogging has on Google. I (heart) kuro5hin, and think they deserve the increased hits they are getting from this rant. One of the comments on the post refers to this stunt as ‘pulling a Janet Jackson’; will this become the accepted term for offensive attention-getting antics like this? Then, there’s the reader who posts what he calls a ‘serious refutation’, which consists of reposting every paragraph of Joyce’s rant and following it with a one-liner about how he disagrees. I hope he’s being tongue-in-cheek. As I said, I (heart) kuro5hin.
